Continued pathetic Biden responses simply encourages Iran and it's proxies. After 50 attacks our enemies do not feel deterred.
Israel is Not Hamas’ Final Solution
VITALIY KATSENELSON
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I usually look forward to waking up every morning. My family is still asleep. I make a cup of coffee, put on my headphones, and write. But I wasn't looking forward to mornings over the last week while I was working on this and tomorrow’s essays. It took me to a dark place where I did not want to go.
I was not planning to write much on this subject. But then a week ago, a client called me. He was very upset, almost panicking, not about his portfolio but about his son being subjected to antisemitism at Cornell University. My heart was already filled with anger and sadness. This call and then reading the news about the state of the US campuses have triggered flashbacks (which I tried so hard to suppress) of experiencing antisemitism in college in Soviet Russia. I could not sit still; I felt that it was my duty to stand up for what I believe and put my thoughts on paper.
Tomorrow, I’ll send you additional thoughts on this topic. Then next week I will revert to my more traditional essays, and I’ll share my thoughts on AI.
If this or tomorrow’s essays are not your cup of tea, you can catch up on my thoughts on the economy, China, oil, the unions, and “art or craft.”
With your help, we have raised close to $220,000 (across multiple charities) to help Israel cope with the Hamas atrocities.
The offer still stands: If you donate $100 or more to one of these charities, we’ll be delighted to mail you a signed copy of one of my books - Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life or The Little Book of Sideway Markets. Donate $200 or more and we’ll send you both. (Email receipt to Barbara at pa@imausa.com and indicate which book you’d like to receive. We can mail in the US only).
By the way, holidays are coming. Donate to these charities, and we can mail signed books directly to your friends as holiday gifts. Everybody wins!
Israel is Not Hamas’ Final Solution
In 2011, my then 10-year-old son Jonah and I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.
The two-story room with the wall of photos brought tears to my eyes. Hundreds of family pictures and portraits from a small Lithuanian town that was home to 4,000 Jews for nine centuries. These people looked like my relatives. A young man in his thirties looked just like my uncle at that age, a 15-year-old kid looked like Jonah in five years, a Hassidic man almost exactly resembled my cousin who is a rabbi in Rego Park, Queens, and so on. The Nazis killed every single Jew in that town, in two days. Nine centuries of history and tradition were wiped from the face of the Earth in just two days!
Jewish history is littered with senseless and gut-wrenching pogroms (massacres) like this. For centuries Jews were killed for no other reason than they were Jews, had their own different religion, and their own different customs and traditions. In a sense, the Nazis simply continued the long history of pogroms, though on vastly larger, industrial scale.
After World War II, a miracle happened – the Jews got their own state. Unfortunately, it was in a hostile neighborhood. Israel, a tiny nation of musicians and scientists who have given so much to this world, was surrounded by twenty Arab countries, which normally could not stand each other but which could finally agree on something – they wanted Israel gone, for no other reason than that they hated Jews.
Jews, now Israelis, had to put down their violins and pens and learn how to defend their country from its neighbors, who attacked it on the day it was born and have kept trying to erase it from the map since. “Jews”, as Golda Meir said, “had a secret weapon: They had nowhere to go.” Against the odds, each time Israel was attacked (and it was never the attacker), it prevailed.
When I left the Holocaust Museum, I felt incredible sadness but also relief. Relief that that my kids and future generations would never have to experience anything like this again. Yes, the words never again have a special meaning to Jews. Never again are we going to be weak and to be slaughtered because we are different.
But then came October 7th. Hamas, with sadistic creativity that made the Nazis look like amateurs, in just a few hours slaughtered 1,500 Jewish civilians. The Nazis tried hard to hide their atrocities. Not Hamas; jihadists celebrated theirs, live-streaming their sadism for the world to see. If only they loved life as much as they loved death, and had used their creativity to bring light instead of darkness, Gaza would have been another gem in the Middle East.
In chess, there is a concept called a "forced move," where a king, when in check (attacked by an opponent's piece), is left with no alternative moves and is forced to make a single, predictable move.
The brutality of this massacre by Hamas forced Israel to move. Hamas knew Israel would have no choice but to invade Gaza (which Israel had previously vacated in 2005) to rid it of Hamas. The problem with forced moves is that they are the worst and only moves. Israeli parents did not want to send their sons and daughters to die in Gaza, but the words never again are forever fresh in their minds, and memories of the Holocaust are still a deep, aching pain in their hearts.
Pause and think: The United States lost 2,996 people in the 9/11 terrorist attack. We scorched the earth to destroy Al Qaeda. Israel's population is only 9.3 million people. The 1,500 casualties Israel suffered would be equivalent to 45,000 people in the US. Can you imagine the response if the US lost 45,000 people in a terrorist attack?
Can you imagine what the US response would be if Mexico had kept launching rockets into Texas, Arizona, and California for over a decade? The Mexicans would already be speaking only English and hamburgers would be their staple food. But this is the reality Israel faces year after year after year. It’s why most Israeli houses have bomb shelters. They have been heavily used over the past month, as Hamas and Hezbollah have barraged Israel with more than 8,000 rockets since October 7. The unceasing rocket attacks alone belie Hamas’ calls for a cease fire.
Hamas knew that Israel, as any other nation that must protect its citizens, would respond to assure nothing like this could ever happen again. “Let’s have peace” (a ceasefire) or a “proportionate” response would not be on their minds.
Then there is the issue of the Palestinians.
Hamas, the elected government of Gaza, cares even less about the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip than it cares about the lives of the terrorists in its army. One of the Hamas commanders was asked why they didn't let the Palestinian populace hide in their tunnels. He answered that it was the responsibility of the UN to take care of the Palestinians. Hamas has taken two million Palestinians and 244 Jews as hostages.
This is why they are launching missiles at Israel from hospitals and schools and hiding in tunnels. They are restricting fuel to their own hospitals, which are running on generators. They are stealing humanitarian funds from their own people and have shot those who tried to flee from the war zone to the south of Gaza.
Today Israel is fighting two wars, against Islamic jihadists and public opinion. One war it will win while paying a high price in casualties; the other one it is losing.
Israel, the only real democracy in the Middle East, values all life and goes out of its way to avoid harming innocent civilians. However, it is at war with an enemy that welcomes death and uses Palestinian citizens as human shields. This is Hamas' intention: It is willing to lose the battle over Gaza to turn Western allies and potential Israeli friends (such as Saudi Arabia) against Israel.
Hamas is fine with putting Palestinian lives in the line of fire from the Israeli Defense Forces. The lives of Palestinians, in their minds, are no price to pay to destroy Israel. If Hamas would put down their weapons, there would be peace. If Israel puts down their weapons, there would be no Israel.
Hamas is playing up to a weak, self-doubting Western world, turning us into useful idiots. The West has been conditioned to think of itself as oppressors, especially if someone has a darker skin color. The West’s collective guilt from centuries of colonial past is there for Hamas to exploit. We lose objectivity and the ability to reason. If we were to look at a chess board, we’d automatically assume that the white pieces were at fault.
It is shocking to see Al Qaeda and ISIS flags at these demonstrations in Europe, on the same streets where these terrorists killed and injured thousands of Europeans over the last twenty years in shootings and suicide bombings. Europeans have already forgotten the attacks in Madrid in 2004 (191 killed), two attacks in London in 2005 (52 killed), the attack in Brussels in 2016 (32 killed), and many others (the list is long). And what about the thousands killed by Al Qaeda on 9/11?
There is no difference (none!) between the flags of Al Qaeda and ISIS and the Nazi swastika, except that the Nazi banner was raised by light-skinned Germans and Islamic jihadists flags are paraded by darker skinned terrorizers.
Our "colonial" guilty conscience is willing to overlook the atrocities committed by Al Qaeda and ISIS followers and the values they represent. Yes, values matter. We forget, or are unwilling to assert, that our Western values are better than theirs because they represent enlightenment – liberty, democracy, equality, freedom of speech, due process. I am not apologetic about it – yes, they are better. Not all values are created equal.
The jihadists are winning the hearts and minds of university students.
University campuses are becoming cradles of antisemitism. Jewish students are being bullied and threatened. Even before the bodies of 1500 slaughtered Jews had time to cool, instead of condemning terror, students jumped into anti-Israeli demonstrations. Several dozen Ivy League school clubs signed a letter blaming Israel for the massacre.
Again, just pause and think about it. I keep coming back to 9/11, but imagine if US students went out onto the streets with Al Qaeda flags and Ivy League organizations signed letters in support of Saudi Arabia (or Iran). Just realize how absurd this is.
In their demonstrations, students are chanting "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. I have a suspicion that most of them don’t understand what this slogan really means. Israel is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and thus there would be no Israel and no Jews. They are basically chanting “Death to Israel.”
What is even more incredible is that the university administrations, instead of assuring their campuses are places where students’ views are challenged (this is how we grow) and ideas are debated, has turned them into "safe places" where opposing ideas or use of a wrong pronoun are treated as acts of violence. Yes, these are the same universities that are afraid that culturally appropriated Halloween costumes will offend their students. These universities have a surprisingly high tolerance for antisemitism and hate speech that incites violence towards Jewish students. These universities are normalizing antisemitism.
I experienced antisemitism in the Soviet Union when I was a cadet in college. It was always normalized from the top. A joke from my commanding officer, in front of other cadets, about my Jewish roots was like a starting pistol for other cadets in the college to make fun of my heritage, and it led to perpetual bullying. Yes, this is what antisemitism feels like – perpetual bullying by one’s society. It gets worse. After a while, you get a feeling that you belong to a lower caste than everyone else and have an inexplicable feeling of guilt for... I’m still not sure for what.
A university administration struggling with its colonialist past should just try to imagine that its Jewish students have dark skin and treat antisemitism with the same vigor as they would treat any other form of racism. They shouldn't have a special "endangered group" list like Harvard University, where the diversity and equality office protects only people of color, women, and LGBTQ+. Instead, they should protect and defend all students - regardless of religion, skin color, or sexual orientation - from racism and discrimination. All students matter!
A poem by German pastor Martin Niemoller, on the wall at the end of the exhibit at the Holocaust Museum, has always stuck with me:
First they came for the communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a communist
Then they came for the socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
I am shocked that I even have to say this: Don’t be fooled; the version of Islam propagated by the jihadists of Hamas and ISIS is not a peaceful religion. It promotes a dystopia of hatred and intolerance that wants you to either join it or be beheaded or burned in the ovens.
First, they’ll come after the only light of freedom in the darkness of the Middle East, but they won't stop there. They think their values are superior to ours. They will want the rest of the Western "infidels" to bend the knee, too. Jews are their first stop but not their final solution.
If you are standing still when they come for the Jews, remember the words of the pastor:
"And there was no one left to speak out for me."
Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of IMA. He is the author of Soul in the Game – The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House). His essays can be read on investor.fm.
Today I would like to share with you Má Vlast by Bedrich Smetana (1824–1864). My daughter Hannah and I were listening to this piece a few days ago in the car when she said, “Dad, this sounds just like the national anthem of Israel.” We looked it up, and Hannah was absolutely right. The intertwined history of the main melody of Smetana’s Má Vlast (“My Homeland,” also known as Moldau) and the Israeli anthem is complex. A predominant theory is that the melody was composed by Italian composer Giuseppino Del Biado, who lived in the 17th century. Then it was turned into a folk song that spread throughout Europe. Smetana, a Czech composer, popularized it in Má Vlast.
Samuel Cohen, a Romanian Israeli immigrant, is given credit for creating “Hatikvah” (“The Hope,” Israel’s national anthem). Cohen claimed that he heard the melody as a child in a Romanian/Moldavian folk song. In the late 19th century it was adopted by Jews as the anthem for the Zionist National Movement. Though it was an unofficial anthem since the creation of Israel in 1948, “Hatikvah” was officially adopted as the national anthem only in 2004. (I guess Israel wanted to try it out for 56 years to see how it felt.)
As I was reading about Moldau I got a bit confused: Why would Czech composer Smetana call a piece about his Czech motherland Moldau? Well, after some digging I discovered that Moldau is the German name for Vlatava – the longest river in the Czech Republic.
Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO at IMA, a value investing firm in Denver. He has written two books on investing, which were published by John Wiley & Sons and have been translated into eight languages. Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House, 2022) is his first non-investing book. You can get unpublished bonus chapters by forwarding your purchase receipt to bonus@soulinthegame.net.
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In Israel, There Is Grief and There Is Fury. Beneath the Fury, Fear.
By BretStephens
A crowd of people stand outside. Three young women wearing black stand at the foreground, crying together.
Several hundred attended the funeral of Dana and Carmel Bachar, killed on Oct. 7.Photographs by Ofir Berman for The New York Times
I landed in Israel and went straight to a funeral.
It was at a small cemetery surrounded by cypress trees and flowering bougainvillea. Being laid to rest were Dana Bachar, a kindergarten teacher, and Carmel, her 15-year-old son, who loved the waves. They were murdered by Hamas terrorists in Kibbutz Be’eri, near Gaza. Carmel was buried with his surfboard while his father, Avida, who had lost a leg in the attack and was in a wheelchair, looked on and wept.
Several hundred people were present, friends and strangers alike. The mourners were distinctly secular and, in their dress, casual. Be’eri was well known for its pro-peace sympathies: It had a special fund to give financial help to Gazans who came to the kibbutz on work permits, and kibbutzniks would often volunteer to drive sick Palestinians to an oncology center in southern Israel.
“They were to the left of Meretz” is how one leading Israeli political figure described the kibbutz’s political sympathies, referring to the most progressive political party in Israel. Hamas must have known this. It butchered the people there all the same. The group may have had several objectives on Oct. 7, from derailing an Israeli-Saudi peace deal to getting Hezbollah to open a second front. But not the least of its aims was to kill Jews for its own sake, to instill a sense of terror so visceral and vivid that it would imprint itself on Israel’s psyche for generations. In that, it has succeeded.
What, I wondered, will it take for the country to recover? Surely a decisive military victory over Hamas, for the sake of deterrence if not justice. But any kind of military victory would be far from sufficient.
I have been coming to Israel for 40 years, through good times and bad. I’ve never seen it in a more damaged state than it is in now — a state in which grief competes with fury and where the target of fury is split between the terrorists who committed the atrocities and the political leadership that left the country exposed to attack.
And beneath the fury, fear.
From the funeral, I drove (with a brief roadside stop to take cover from incoming rocket fire) to the morgue at the Shura Army Base, where a forensics team opened trailer-size containers of bagged corpses in cold storage. Even at low temperatures, the smell left no doubt as to what was inside. Gilad Bahat, a police investigator, described examining babies who had been shot and burned, people who had been decapitated after being killed and a gruesome hodgepodge of hard-to-identify arms, skulls and other remains.
“Never have we seen such a sight,” Bahat said. He’s been on the force for 27 years.
Later, at an army headquarters in Tel Aviv, I was given a private screening of some 46 minutes of footage of the events of Oct. 7, assembled from security cameras, smartphone videos recorded by victims and survivors, and the GoPro footage taken by the terrorists themselves. I watched as one terrorist casually murdered a father with a hand grenade and then raided his fridge while two orphaned boys whimpered in fear. I watched another who tried to behead a wounded Thai field worker with a garden hoe while shouting “Allahu akbar.” I listened to a third who, in a phone call to his parents, boasted, “I killed more than 10 Jews with my bare hands!”
I also visited Kibbutz Nir Oz, which lost a quarter of its approximately 400 members to murder and kidnapping. I saw bedroom floors and bunk-bed mattresses soaked in blood. I saw incinerated homes and graffiti in Arabic taking ownership of the crime: “Al-Qassam Brigade.” I met Hadas Calderon, who lost her mother and her niece on Oct. 7, and whose two children and ex-husband are now, as best as she knows, hostages in Gaza. “The world has to scream,” she said. “Bring the children home now.”
Words such as “evil,” “horror,” “blood bath” and “terror” tend to exist, for most of us, on a conceptual or hyperbolic plane. Not for Israelis. They are under no illusions that had the Hamas terrorists been able to kill 100 or 1,000 times as many of them as they did on Oct. 7, they would have done so without hesitation.
That’s a point that needs to factor in to any thoughtful analysis of the Jewish state’s predicament. There’s an asymmetry in this conflict, but it’s not about the preponderance of military power. Israel’s goal in this war is political and strategic: to defeat Hamas as the reigning power in Gaza, even though there will be unavoidable cost in innocent lives, since Hamas operates among civilians. But Hamas’s goal is only secondarily political. Fundamentally, it’s homicidal: to end Israel as a state by slaughtering every Jew within it. How can critics of Israeli policy insist on a unilateral cease-fire or other forms of restraint against Hamas if they can’t offer a credible answer to a reasonable Israeli question: How can we go on like this?
The day after the Bachars’ funeral, I traveled to Camp Iftach, a small military base a few hundred yards north of the Gaza border. It was Oct. 25, a day after Hamas had attempted, unsuccessfully, a seaborne infiltration of the nearby beachside kibbutz of Zikim. The entire area was on high alert.
Getting to the camp meant driving my car at high speed from military checkpoint to checkpoint, tailing an Israeli Army Humvee on sandy roads surrounded by fields burned to ash by falling rockets. The camp itself was a collection of concrete bunkers, with hundreds of shell casings from the pitched battles of Oct. 7 littering the pavement outside.
One of the senior officers on base is Lt. Col. Tom Elgarat, whose careworn face looks much older than his 41 years. When I met him, he was getting his soldiers ready for the ground invasion that would begin a few days later.
“This cannot go on,” he said. “If you have to lose life, if you have to take life, this cannot go on.”
By “this,” Elgarat meant the matzav, the situation, in which Israelis now find themselves. He lives in Tel Aviv, where his wife was trying to hold things together while schools were closed and the kids were home. But he grew up in Nir Oz. One of his cousins there, he says, is “alive by pure chance,” having been barricaded with her family for hours. “I want to look in her face and say, you can go back to your house.” Two of his uncles and one of his best friends are among the hostages.
The issue of Israel’s internally displaced people gets short shrift in most news accounts. But it’s central to the way in which Israelis perceive the war. There are now more than 150,000 Israelis — proportionately the equivalent of about 5.3 million Americans — who were forced out of their homes by the attacks of Oct. 7. Small cities like Sderot, near Gaza, and Kiryat Shmona, near Lebanon, are now mostly ghost towns and will remain that way if the government can’t secure its borders.
Should that happen, sizable parts of Israel’s already minuscule territory would become essentially uninhabitable. That, in turn, would mean the failure of the Jewish state to maintain a safe homeland, presaging the end of Zionism itself. It’s why Israelis think of this war as existential and why they’re willing to put aside their fury at Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers, for a while, to win the war.
Will they win?
If the question is whether Israel will be able to defeat Hamas, the answer is almost certainly yes: Israeli military planners have been war-gaming an invasion of Gaza for decades and, despite the intelligence blunders of Oct. 7, have tools and tactics that can flush Hamas’s fighters out of their maze of tunnels. Nor is the Israeli public likely to be swayed by civilian casualties into supporting any kind of cease-fire in the military campaign until Hamas is defeated and the hostages are returned. Israelis spent 18 years watching Hamas turn to its military advantage every Israeli concession — including free electricity, cash transfers of Qatari funds, work permits for Gazans, thousands of truckloads of humanitarian goods. Israelis won’t get fooled again.
But while Israelis are still processing the horror from the south, the threat of war looms on every side. Around the world, too many people are showing their true colors when it comes to their feelings about Jews, and darkness in the West has made it feel colder in Israel.
A few days after my visit to Camp Iftach, I drove north to Metula, a picturesque Israeli village on a finger of land surrounded on three sides by Lebanon. Other than a handful of soldiers, it was mostly deserted; it would almost surely be captured by Hezbollah in the early hours of a full-scale conflict, which would make the Gaza front look like child’s play.
In the West Bank, nightly Israeli security raids against Hamas and allied terror cells in cities like Jenin and Nablus are largely what stand in the way between the unpopular and corrupt Palestinian Authority and a Hamas coup. Compounding the tension is a sharp uptick in settler violence, with some seeing the crisis as an “opportunity to vent their spleen with M-16s,” as an Israeli reporter put it to me. Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, has even suggested effectively banning the Palestinian olive harvest, ostensibly for security reasons. “That would be like banning the Super Bowl,” the reporter observed. It would guarantee an explosion.
And then there’s the wider world. Vladimir Putin, whom Netanyahu did so much to court over more than a decade, has all but openly thrown his support behind Hamas, in part because of Russia’s deepening alliance with Hamas’s patrons in Iran. In China, state-run and social media have veered sharply into open antisemitism. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with whom Israel had been engaged in a careful rapprochement, has reverted to Islamist form. “Hamas is not a terrorist organization,” he told members of his parliamentary group late last month, but a “mujahedeen liberation group struggling to protect its people and lands.”
Just as frightening to many Israelis I spoke with was the turn against Israel in the West, a turn that, increasingly, is nakedly pro-Hamas and antisemitic. It’s visible in more than just the attempted firebombing of a synagogue in Berlin or the chants of “gas the Jews” in Sydney, Australia. It’s also in the sheer indifference among educated elites to Israeli suffering — typified by college-age students tearing down campus posters of kidnapped Israeli civilians.
“The effort on campuses and progressive circles to equate Zionism with all that is evil prepared the ground for the hardening belief that ‘the Jews had it coming,’” Einat Wilf, a Harvard graduate and former member of the Knesset for the Labor Party, told me. To many Israelis, there’s a distinct echo of what happened at German universities beginning about a century ago.
It may be that what started near Gaza will end there, too. But there’s a growing sense among Israelis, as well as many Jews in the diaspora, that what happened on Oct. 7 may be the opening act of something much larger and worse: another worldwide war against the Jews.
A few days after my visit to Camp Iftach, as Israeli troops prepared to enter Gaza, I got a WhatsApp message from Elgarat: “Tonight is the start of the changing process that will bring Israel to a better place. But for my family and many friends, it is too late. All I can do now is focus on the mission. After this is all done, the time for sorrow and grief will come.”
Elgarat had clarity of purpose. But for many Israelis, what comes next seems much more muddled, especially politically. What can Israelis do about a government whose machinations had already created more turmoil and division than Israel had ever seen, whose incompetence and neglect had given Hamas a free hand, yet seems immovable?
“Toppling Bibi will be harder than toppling Hamas,” Anshel Pfeffer, a journalist and the author of “Bibi,” an acclaimed biography of Netanyahu, told me when I had dinner with him in Jerusalem.
Pfeffer’s view isn’t widely shared among Israeli political analysts, who think that massive protests or defections by Likud lawmakers or their coalition partners will quickly bring down the government once the war ends. My guess is that Pfeffer is right: The government, to adapt a line often attributed to Ben Franklin, will hang together because otherwise it will hang separately. And if one of the Oct. 7 lessons for many Israelis is that a right-wing government failed, another lesson is that right-wing ideology was vindicated, at least insofar as a Palestinian state is concerned. If tens of thousands of Israelis were put at mortal risk when Gaza became a quasi-state after Israel’s withdrawal in 2005, what would it mean to put millions of Israelis at risk along much longer borders if the same process were to be repeated in the West Bank? That’s a thought that will weigh heavily on Israelis’ minds if there’s even a whisper of a chance that Hamas or a similar group might come to power.
Even so, it’s hard to overstate the breadth of public disgust with Netanyahu — not only for his failure to heed loud warnings from his generals before Oct. 7 about the military’s diminished readiness, but even more so for his refusal to take responsibility, much less apologize, for his role in the debacle. Seventy-six percent of Israelis think he should resign, according to a recent poll. Ministers can’t show their faces at funerals, shivas or hospital waiting rooms for fear of being yelled at and chased out.
Perhaps nobody feels this disgust more acutely than Amir Tibon, a correspondent for the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Tibon became internationally famous last month after his family’s rescue, by his 62-year-old father, Noam (a retired general), when his kibbutz was overrun by Hamas terrorists. “Saba higea” — “Grandpa is here,” the words with which Amir’s 3-year-old daughter greeted Noam after 10 hours of terrified silence in their safe room — have since become words of pride and hope to Israelis desperately in need of both.
I went to see Amir in a kibbutz in the north, where he and his family were living with relatives. Amir pointed to his shirt: borrowed from a cousin. His car: also borrowed. His pants: from a giveaway rack collected by volunteers.
Amir hails from that segment of Israeli society that Netanyahu and his allies had spent the previous year demonizing: “elites,” “Ashkenazim,” “anarchists,” “leftists.” It’s true that by the terms of Israel’s political discourse, he and his neighbors tilted left; they had certainly been at the forefront of efforts to stop Netanyahu’s efforts to destroy the power of the Supreme Court. But it’s also true that on Oct. 7, it was largely his segment of society that became the embodiment of Zionism, as both its martyrs and its heroes.
I asked Amir what needed to change going forward. His first answer: More people would need permits to carry personal sidearms. “We were trained all our lives to trust the government and trust the military,” he said. “After this, people are going to trust themselves.”
His second: “Zero tolerance for semi-corrupt political appointments,” he said, a clear reference to characters such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right nebbish who holds the position of minister for national security. “Israelis are under too many threats and exposed on too many fronts to accept a mediocre, amateurish, self-interested rule by people who are not trustworthy.”
The Tibon family’s story is testimony that on Oct. 7, Israel’s people were far better than its government. Amir told me of sitting with a member of his kibbutz’s security team “who fought this insane battle, underarmed” against the hundred-odd Hamas terrorists who entered the Nahal Oz kibbutz that morning. “You cannot avoid a sense of despair when you see the leadership we have,” he told me. “And you can’t avoid a sense of pride when you see the citizens who saved lives on that day.”
There were other points of hope mixed into the general gloom of Israeli life today. I met reservists who had dropped busy careers and flown in from Chicago, Dubai and Melbourne, Australia, to rejoin their old units. A sergeant on Elgarat’s staff who goes by the nickname Cholo — he was D.J.’ing large parties in Brazil but flew back to Israel immediately after Oct. 7 to serve — was clear about where he stood: “I am not supporting this government, but I will go to the army.”
Not many countries can inspire such a willingness to sacrifice in times of crisis. It’s how Israel pulled through in the past, particularly during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, where a costly victory helped ease the pain of an initial debacle and where an eventual peace redeemed the price of both.
Also hopeful was the willingness of Israelis to acknowledge failure — and to seek to learn from it.
Nobody in Israel, including in the highest echelons of its defense establishment, disputes the military and intelligence sides of the failure. The lessons from it, tactical and strategic, are sure to be digested in the months ahead. Chief among them: Don’t try to answer a strategic problem, such as Hamas’s rule in Gaza, with a purely technogical solution, like the various wonder weapons that were supposed to keep the group in check.
But the country’s long-term fortunes will depend on its ability to recognize and correct the political failures that led to Oct. 7. Over dozens of conversations here, a few core questions emerged:
Will Israelis finally see the danger of electing tough-talking narcissists who practice the politics of mass polarization? And will they understand that politics in a Jewish state — which is as much a family as it is a polity — can’t be conducted by one narrow majority jamming its ideas down the throats of a bitterly opposed minority?
Will they see the folly of dividing themselves into a multitude of separate and mutually antagonistic tribes — Jewish and Arab; Ashkenazi and Mizrahi; left wing and right wing; secular and religious — so that they can tear one another to political pieces in full view of their foes?
Will they recognize that Israel’s single greatest strategic asset is the devoted patriotism that its people feel for their state — a feeling that will inevitably suffer if their government repeatedly comprises freeloaders, bigots, tax cheats and ideological arsonists?
Will they understand that the ultimate purpose of Zionism is self-rule for the Jewish people, not indefinite rule over others? A plausible Palestinian state living peacefully alongside Israel may be years or even decades away, given the wretched state of Palestinian politics. But Israel also has a long-term responsibility to safeguard the possibility of such a state against attempts to abort it.
Finally, will Israelis remember that the responsibility that falls on them now is a responsibility not for them alone? “I have a premonition that will not leave me,” the philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote in 1968. “As it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the Holocaust will be upon us.”
Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook
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Israel Facts:
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ISRAEL AND JERUSALEM FACTS:
1. Israel became a state in 1312 B.C., two millennia before Islam.
2. Arab refugees from Israel began calling themselves "Palestinians" in 1967, two decades after
(modern) Israeli statehood.
3. After conquering the land in 1272 B.C., Jews ruled it for a thousand years and maintained a
continuous presence there for 3,300 years.
4. The only Arab rule following conquest in 633 A.D. lasted just 22 years.
5. For over 3,300 years, Jerusalem was the Jewish capital. It was never the capital of any Arab
or Muslim entity. Even under Jordanian rule, (east) Jerusalem was not made the capital, and no
Arab leader came to visit it.
6. Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in the Bible, but not once is it mentioned in the
Qur'an.
7. King David founded Jerusalem; Mohammed never set foot in it.
8. Jews pray facing Jerusalem; Muslims face Mecca. If they are between the two cities,
Muslims pray facing Mecca, with their backs to Jerusalem.
9. In 1948, Arab leaders urged their people to leave, promising to cleanse the land of Jewish
presence. Sixty-eight percent of them fled without ever setting eyes on an Israeli soldier.
10. Virtually the entire Jewish population of Muslim countries had to flee as the result of
violence and pogroms.
11. Some 630,000 Arabs left Israel in 1948, while close to a million Jews were forced to leave
the Muslim countries.
12. In spite of the vast territories at their disposal, Arab refuges were deliberately prevented
from assimilating into their host countries. Of 100 million refugees following World War II,
they are the only group to have never integrated with their coreligionists. Most of the Jewish
refugees from Europe and Arab lands were settled in Israel, a country no larger than New Jersey.
13. There are 22 Muslim countries, not counting Palestine. There is only one Jewish state.
Arabs started all five wars against Israel, and lost every one of them.
14. Fatah and Hamas constitutions still call for the destruction of Israel. Israel ceded most of the
west bank and all of Gaza to the Palestinian authority, and even provided it with arms.
15. During the Jordanian occupation, Jewish holy sites were vandalized and were off limits to
Jews. Under Israeli rule, all Muslim and Christian holy sites are accessible to all faiths.
16. Out of 175 United Nations Security Council resolutions up to 1990, 97 were against Israel;
out of 690 general assembly resolutions, 429 were against Israel.
17. The U.N. was silent when the Jordanians destroyed 58 synagogues in the old city of
Jerusalem. It remained silent while Jordan systematically desecrated the ancient Jewish
cemetery on the mount of olives, and it remained silent when Jordan enforced apartheid laws
preventing Jews from accessing the temple mount and western wall.
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A Young Palestinian Who Found Refuge in Israel
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Many Arab nations want diplomatic relationships with Israel but must walk a fine line because they want to avoid wakening their radical street. Iran fears this linkage and is why they unleashed Hamas and will unleash Hezbollah if the situation continues to put their goal of control of the region at risk.
The only thing that restrains Iran is they do not want to confront America. However, because Biden is so weak they might take the risk of expanding the war based on Biden's 3 or 4 pitiful responses to well over 50 attacks on our troops by Iran's proxies.
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Saudis and 8 More Arab Countries Block Anti-Israel Measures at Arab Summit
Riyadh joins other moderate Arab states in rejecting a call to isolate the Jewish state over its war against Hamas.
By JNS
Saudi Arabia on Saturday helped to block a bid by Arab and Muslim countries to militarily and economically isolate Israel, according to Israeli media reports.
Most of the states present at an Arab League and Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) emergency summit in Riyadh focusing on the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza sought to impose five measures against the Jewish state, Channel 12 reported.
The demands were to prevent the transfer of U.S. military equipment to Israel from American bases in the Middle East region; suspend all diplomatic and economic contacts with Israel; cut back oil sales to the United States over Washington’s support for Israel; stop Israeli air traffic over the skies of the Gulf and send a joint delegation to the United States, Europe and Russia to push for a ceasefire
The resolution to adopt these measures was blocked by Israel’s Abraham accords partner states the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. They were joined by Egypt and Jordan, two countries with long-standing peace agreements with Israel. Saudi Arabia, Mauritania and Djibouti also opposed the measures.
Israeli-Saudi ties were thawing before Oct. 7, when Hamas attacked Gaza-area communities, killing 1,200 Israelis and taking more than 200 people to Gaza as hostages. The war has apparently slowed, but not derailed, efforts to normalize relations between Jerusalem and Riyadh.
Israel and the northwest African country of Mauritania had diplomatic relations from 1999-2009 but they were frozen during the Gaza war of 2009. Djibouti, located on the African Horn, never had diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.
An Iranian demand that the Israel Defense Forces be designated as a terror organization was also rejected.
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